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But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force tothat intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the "

Amiel's Journal

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Title: Amiel's Journal

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AMIEL'S JOURNAL

THE JOURNAL INTIME OF HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

By Mrs HUMPHREY WARD

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime," I have inserted a good many newpassages, taken from the last French edition (_Cinquiéme édition, revue et augmentée_.) But I have nottranslated all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have I omitted certain sections of the Journal

which in these two recent volumes have been omitted by their French editors It would be of no interest togive my reasons for these variations at length They depend upon certain differences between the English andthe French public, which are more readily felt than explained Some of the passages which I have left

untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective side of the Journal, already so full to overweight

it, at any rate, for English readers Others which I have retained, though they often relate to local names andbooks, more or less unfamiliar to the general public, yet seemed to me valuable as supplying some of thatsurrounding detail, that setting, which helps one to understand a life Besides, we English are in many waysmore akin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the French readers to whom the original Journal primarilyaddresses itself, and some of the entries I have kept have probably, by the nature of things, more savor for usthan for them

M A W

PREFACE

This translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime" is primarily addressed to those whose knowledge of French, while

it may be sufficient to carry them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper,

is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate a book containing subtle and complicated forms

of expression I believe there are many such to be found among the reading public, and among those whowould naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind as Amiel's, were it not for the barrier of

language It is, at any rate, in the hope that a certain number of additional readers may be thereby attracted tothe "Journal Intime" that this translation of it has been undertaken

The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable, owing, first of all, to those ellipticalmodes of speech which a man naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public, butwhich a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand Every here and there Amiel expresseshimself in a kind of shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English equivalent, atonce terse and clear, is hard to find Another difficulty has been his constant use of a technical philosophicallanguage, which, according to his French critics, is not French even philosophical French but German Veryoften it has been impossible to give any other than a literal rendering of such passages, if the thought of theoriginal was to be preserved; but in those cases where a choice was open to me, I have preferred the moreliterary to the more technical expression; and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, when hecame to prepare for publication a certain number of "Pensées," extracted from the Journal, and printed at theend of a volume of poems published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences which survive

in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in a more literary form in the "Grains de Mil."

In two or three cases not more, I think I have allowed myself to transpose a sentence bodily, and in a fewinstances I have added some explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any

importance, are indicated by square brackets

My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M Edmond Scherer, from whose valuable and interestingstudy, prefixed to the French Journal, as well as from certain materials in his possession which he has verykindly allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the greater part of the biographical material embodied

in the Introduction M Scherer has also given me help and advice through the whole process of

translation advice which his scholarly knowledge of English has made especially worth having

In the translation of the more technical philosophical passages I have been greatly helped by another friend,

Mr Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care andpains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance

But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by these friends but by others, I confide thelittle book to the public with many a misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and readers here and

there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded that his life had been a barren mistake; whereas, allthe while such is the irony of things he had been in reality working out the mission assigned him in thespiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthfulconsciousness: "_Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy offeeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_."

MARY A WARD

INTRODUCTION

It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri Frédéric Amiel's "Journal Intime"was published at Geneva The book, of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance,contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of M Edmond Scherer, the well-known Frenchcritic, who had been for many years one of Amiel's most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a little

Avertissement, in which the "Editors" that is to say, the Genevese friends to whom the care and publication

of the Journal had been in the first instance entrusted described in a few reserved and sober words the genesisand objects of the publication Some thousands of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty

years, had come into the hands of Amiel's literary heirs "They were written," said the Avertissement, "with

several ends in view Amiel recorded in them his various occupations, and the incidents of each day Hepreserved in them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him by books But hisJournal was, above all, the confidant of his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinkerbecame conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, thevoice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace, might make themselvesfreely heard

" In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him, Amiel expressed the wish that his literaryexecutors should publish those parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either interest asthought or value as experience The publication of this volume is the fulfillment of this desire The reader will

find in it, not a volume of Memoirs, but the confidences of a solitary thinker, the meditations of a philosopher

for whom the things of the soul were the sovereign realities of existence."

Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet _début_ It contained nothing, or almost nothing,

of ordinary biographical material M Scherer's Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary

to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but nothing more Everything of a local or private

character that could be excluded was excluded The object of the editors in their choice of passages for

publication was declared to be simply "the reproduction of the moral and intellectual physiognomy of theirfriend," while M Scherer expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and limited his Introduction as far

as possible to "a study of the character and thought of Amiel." The contents of the volume, then, were purelyliterary and philosophical; its prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, and the public which can admit theclaims and overlook the inherent defects of introspective literature has always been a small one The writer ofthe Journal had been during his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European public In Geneva itself hehad been commonly regarded as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and expectations of hisfriends, whose reserve and indecision of character had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated thesociety around him; while his professional lectures were generally pronounced dry and unattractive, and thefew volumes of poems which represented almost his only contributions to literature had nowhere met with anyreal cordiality of reception Those concerned, therefore, in the publication of the first volume of the Journalcan hardly have had much expectation of a wide success Geneva is not a favorable starting-point for a Frenchbook, and it may well have seemed that not even the support of M Scherer's name would be likely to carry thevolume beyond a small local circle

But "wisdom is justified of her children!" It is now nearly three years since the first volume of the "JournalIntime" appeared; the impression made by it was deepened and extended by the publication of the second

volume in 1884; and it is now not too much to say that this remarkable record of a life has made its way towhat promises to be a permanent place in literature Among those who think and read it is beginning to begenerally recognized that another book has been added to the books which live not to those, perhaps, whichlive in the public view, much discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of struggle, but to those inwhich a germ of permanent life has been deposited silently, almost secretly, which compel no homage andexcite no rivalry, and which owe the place that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to nothing but thatindestructible sympathy of man with man, that eternal answering of feeling to feeling, which is one of thegreat principles, perhaps the greatest principle, at the root of literature M Scherer naturally was the firstamong the recognized guides of opinion to attempt the placing of his friend's Journal "The man who, duringhis lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or conscious work worthy of his powers, has now left

us, after his death, a book which will not die For the secret of Amiel's malady is sublime, and the expression

of it wonderful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the Introduction, and one may see in the sentencesanother instance of that courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the mediocrecritic For it is as true now as it was in the days when La Bruyère rated the critics of his time for their

incapacity to praise, and praise at once, that "the surest test of a man's critical power is his judgment of

contemporaries." M Renan, I think, with that exquisite literary sense of his, was the next among the

authorities to mention Amiel's name with the emphasis it deserved He quoted a passage from the Journal inhis Preface to the "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse," describing it as the saying "_d'un penseur distingué,

M Amiel de Genève_." Since then M Renan has devoted two curious articles to the completed Journal in the

Journal des Desbats The first object of these reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical appreciation of

Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have been haunting various corners of M Renan's mindfor several years past, and to which it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis and

brusquerie to satisfy even his passion for intellectual adventure Still, the rank of the book was fully

recognized, and the first article especially contained some remarkable criticisms, to which we shall findoccasion to recur "In these two volumes of _pensées_," said M Renan, "without any sacrifice of truth toartistic effect, we have both the perfect mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the best modernculture, and also a striking picture of the sufferings which beset the sterility of genius These two volumesmay certainly be reckoned among the most interesting philosophical writings which have appeared of lateyears."

M Caro's article on the first volume of the Journal, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for February, 1883, may

perhaps count as the first introduction of the book to the general cultivated public He gave a careful analysis

of the first half of the Journal resumed eighteen months later in the same periodical on the appearance of thesecond volume and, while protesting against what he conceived to be the general tendency and effect ofAmiel's mental story, he showed himself fully conscious of the rare and delicate qualities of the new writer

"_La rêverie a réussi à notre auteur_," he says, a little reluctantly for M Caro has his doubts as to the

legitimacy of _rêverie_; "Il en aufait une oeuvure qui restera." The same final judgment, accompanied by a

very different series of comments, was pronounced on the Journal a year later by M Paul Bourget, a youngand rising writer, whose article is perhaps chiefly interesting as showing the kind of effect produced byAmiel's thought on minds of a type essentially alien from his own There is a leaven of something positive andaustere, of something which, for want of a better name, one calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes theauthor of "Une Cruelle Enigme." But whether he has understood Amiel or no, M Bourget is fully alive to themark which the Journal is likely to make among modern records of mental history He, too, insists that thebook is already famous and will remain so; in the first place, because of its inexorable realism and sincerity; inthe second, because it is the most perfect example available of a certain variety of the modern mind

Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted the attention of all who keep a vigilant eye on the

progress of foreign literature, and although one or two appreciative articles have appeared on it in the

magazines, the book has still to become generally known One remarkable English testimony to it, however,must be quoted Six months after the publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, who since thenhas himself bequeathed to literature a strange and memorable fragment of autobiography, addressed a letter to

M Scherer as the editor of the "Journal Intime," which M Scherer has since published, nearly a year after the

death of the writer The words have a strong and melancholy interest for all who knew Mark Pattison; andthey certainly deserve a place in any attempt to estimate the impression already made on contemporarythought by the "Journal Intime."

"I wish to convey to you, sir," writes the rector of Lincoln, "the thanks of one at least of the public for givingthe light to this precious record of a unique experience I say unique, but I can vouch that there is in existence

at least one other soul which has lived through the same struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel In yourpathetic description of the _volonté qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante à se fournir à elle-même desmotifs_ of the repugnance for all action the soul petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this I

recognize myself _Celui qui a déchiffré le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu le mot, est sorti du monde desvivants, il est mort de fait_ I can feel forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to myself!

"It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my egotism upon you that I have ventured upon addressing you

As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a psychological revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty

to the editor to assure him that there are persons in the world whose souls respond, in the depths of theirinmost nature, to the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in the pages of these remarkable confessions."

So much for the place which the Journal the fruit of so many years of painful thought and disappointedeffort; seems to be at last securing for its author among those contemporaries who in his lifetime knew

nothing of him It is a natural consequence of the success of the book that the more it penetrates, the greaterdesire there is to know something more than its original editors and M Scherer have yet told us about thepersonal history of the man who wrote it about his education, his habits, and his friends Perhaps some daythis wish may find its satisfaction It is an innocent one, and the public may even be said to have a kind ofright to know as much as can be told it of the personalities which move and stir it At present the biographicalmaterial available is extremely scanty, and if it were not for the kindness of M Scherer, who has allowed thepresent writer access to certain manuscript material in his possession, even the sketch which follows, vagueand imperfect as it necessarily is, would have been impossible

[Footnote: Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel's life have been contributed to the _Révue

Internationale_ by Mdlle Berthe Vadier during the passage of the present book through the press My

knowledge of them, however, came too late to enable me to make use of them for the purposes of the presentintroduction.]

Henri Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 1821 He belonged to one of the emigrant families,

of which a more or less steady supply had enriched the little republic during the three centuries following theReformation Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of theEdict of Nantes His father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the power of theFrench republic, and would seem to have married and settled in the halcyon days following the restoration ofGenevese independence in 1814 Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, when thelittle state was administered by men of European reputation, and Genevese society had power to attractdistinguished visitors and admirers from all parts The veteran Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray

and the associate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his appartement overlooking the woods of

La Bâtie Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese

legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame deCandolle, kept the country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed nationality of theplace the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and Protestant solidity was

beginning to find inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of Töpffer The country was governed

by an aristocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of merit and intellect, and the

moderate constitutional ideas which represented the Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period were nowheremore warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than in Geneva

During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be

visible in this brilliant Genevese society The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled, theRestoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger generation, with all its respectability,wanted energy, above all, wanted leaders The revolutionary forces in the state, which had made themselvesviolently felt during the civil turmoils of the period preceding the assembly of the French States General, andhad afterward produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been for awhile laid tosleep by the events of 1814 But the slumber was a short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quittedthe republic for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the political future of the littlestate which had given him an exile and a Catholic so generous a welcome in 1819 The ideas of 1830 wereshaking the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation as a whole, and of many of thecantons composing it Geneva was still apparently tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed, but no onelooking back on the history of the republic, and able to measure the strength of the Radical force in Europeafter the fall of Charles X., could have felt much doubt but that a few more years would bring Geneva alsointo the whirlpool of political change.

In the same year 1833 that M Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frédéric Amiel, at twelve years old, was leftorphaned of both his parents They had died comparatively young his mother was only just over thirty, andhis father cannot have been much older On the death of the mother the little family was broken up, the boypassing into the care of one relative, his two sisters into that of another Certain notes in M Scherer's

possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood and youth which must necessarily have been alittle bare and forlorn They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather delicate than robust,already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in thosereligious problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin Thereligious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission to full church membership, made adeep impression on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end,showed themselves very early At the college or public school of Geneva, and at the académie, he would seem

to have done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned We are told, however, that he readenormously, and that he was, generally speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himselfthan with his contemporaries He fell specially under the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologistand man of letters belonging to a well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while reviewingone of M Pictet's books, to give grateful expression to his sense of obligation

Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M Pictet's Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840 thefirst ever delivered in a town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival and enemy ofthe True "He who is now writing," says Amiel, "was then among M Pictet's youngest hearers Since thentwenty experiences of the same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet none haseffaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures Coming as they did at a favorable moment, andanswering many a positive question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive influenceover his thought; they were to him an important step in that continuous initiation which we call life, they filledhim with fresh intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams And, as always happens with afirst-rate man, what struck him even more than the teaching was the teacher So that this memory of 1840 isstill dear and precious to him, and for this double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, the student ofthose days delights in expressing to the professor of 1840 his sincere and filial gratitude."

Amiel's first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have been the result partly of these lectures,and partly of a visit to Italy which began in November, 1841 In 1842, a year which was spent entirely in Italyand Sicily, he contributed three articles on M Rio's book, "L'Art Chrétien," to the _Bibliothèque Universelle

de Genève_ We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first review writing it at

inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way,

which is a little nạve and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of work and purpose ispromising All that is individual in it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, andsecondly, the tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt here and there, especially in one ratherremarkable passage As to the Christian feeling, we find M Rio described as belonging to "that noble school

of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of

materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of trueprogress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated as a disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which theidealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times "The Renaissance perhapsrobbed us of more than it gave us" and so on The tone of criticism is instructive enough to the student ofAmiel's mind, but the product itself has no particular savor of its own The occasional note of depression anddiscouragement, however, is a different thing; here, for those who know the "Journal Intime," there is alreadysomething characteristic, something which foretells the future For instance, after dwelling with evident zest

on the nature of the metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in particular,the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M Rio's task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of theinvestigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on which their successdepends the imaginative and the analytical faculty work harmoniously and effectively together And

supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience has succeeded in forcing his wayfarther than any previous explorer into the recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the

enormous, the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate communication from mind to mind;there still remains the question whether, after all, "he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisiblewould not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, 'devour his heart insecret;' whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remainedburied in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers those whose hand hasbeen boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it had notbetter, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which humantongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive."

Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the passage;one feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased the writer's immature literary sense; but there issomething else too there is a breath of that same speculative passion which burns in the Journal, and onehears, as it were, the first accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which became inafter years the fixed characteristic of the writer "At twenty he was already proud, timid, and melancholy,"

writes an old friend; and a little farther on, "Discouragement took possession of him very early."

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary and inevitable, the years whichfollowed these articles, from 1842 to Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual

expansion They were Amiel's Wanderjahre, spent in a free, wandering student life, which left deep marks on

his intellectual development During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Berlin; but everyvacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh intellectual center Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in

1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and he was tomake acquaintance with London ten years later, in 1851 No circumstances could have been more favorable,one would have thought, to the development of such a nature With his extraordinary power of "throwinghimself into the object" of effacing himself and his own personality in the presence of the thing to be

understood and absorbed he must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in a state of continuousintellectual energy and excitement It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself withMaine de Biran, "This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me My horizon is vaster; Ihave seen much more of men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences." Thisfact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical estimate ofAmiel as a man or writer We may so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary

professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the

pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to think about Not at all The man whohas left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less into thesocial and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with the books, but,

to a large extent also, with the men of his generation The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not theproduct, but the mistress of circumstance It took from the outer world what that world had to give, and thenmade the stuff so gained subservient to its own ends

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by far the most important "It was atHeidelberg and Berlin," says M Scherer, "that the world of science and speculation first opened on the

dazzled eyes of the young man He was accustomed to speak of his four years at Berlin as 'his intellectualphase,' and one felt that he inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life The spell which Berlinlaid upon him lasted long." Probably his happiness in Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction againstGeneva There are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in theGerman world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundingsfar more readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Rome Howeverthis may be, it is certain that German thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only inGerman methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in German forms of sentiment, whichclung to him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions and his style M Renan and M Bourget shaketheir heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain "barbarous" air to many

passages of the Journal But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force tothat intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the "JournalIntime." Amiel, in fact, is one more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous importance

in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms inwhich a writer like M Taine describes it "From 1780 to 1830," says M Taine, "Germany produced all the

ideas of our historical age, and during another half-century, perhaps another century, notre grande affaire sera

de les repenser." He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on the modern world to the ferment

of the Renaissance No spiritual force "more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of everysort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking everything presented to it, has arisen during thelast three hundred years Like the spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into its orbit allthe great works of contemporary intelligence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regardsthe worship of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Stặl as the natural result of reaction fromthe eighteenth century and all its ways "German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all wereeagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the

Revolution Under the Restoration France continued to study German philosophy and poetry with profoundveneration and submission We imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we compiled, translated,

imitated." The importance of the part played by German influence in French Romanticism has indeed beenmuch disputed, but the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and French historical study, to Germanmethods and German research during the last half-century is beyond dispute And the movement to-day is asstrong as ever A modern critic like M Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the artificial stimulus given

by the war to the study of German has, to some extent, checked the study of English in France He thinks thatthe French have more to gain from our literature taking literature in its general and popular sense than fromGerman literature But he raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to the German mind

in matters of exact thought and knowledge "To study philology, mythology, history, without reading

German," he is as ready to confess as any one else, "is to condemn one's self to remain in every departmenttwenty years behind the progress of science."

Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and remarkable instance Having caughtfrom the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiablecuriosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, hethen brings those elements in him which belong to his French inheritance and something individual besides,which is not French but Genevese to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literaryinterest and value Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion For one who was to write and think inFrench, he was perhaps too long in Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too

much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual activities "As to his literary talent," says

M Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, "the profitwhich Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is more doubtful Too long contact with the German mind had led

to the development in him of certain strangenesses of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and evenperhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt the need of checking and correcting." This is verytrue Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M Caro puts it, of attempts "to write German in French," and there are

in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of _Schwärmerei_, here and there, of which a good dealmust be laid to the account of his German training.

M Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to Paris Paris, he thinks, would havecounteracted the Hegelian influences brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however, onthe subject of Amiel's philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.] would havetaught him cheerfulness, and taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book

Possibly but how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have had one

accomplished French critic the more Instead of the spiritual drama of the "Journal Intime," some furtheradditions to French _belles lettres_; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there is no

wishing the German element in Amiel away Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperamentgoes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history The language he speaks is the

language of that French criticism which we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it is best described by themotto of Montaigne, "_Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, à la française_," and the thought he tries

to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: "What

I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge

Always the complete, the absolute, the teres atque rotundum." And it was this antagonism, or rather this

fusion of traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so manynew lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities of fresh and individual expression

We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general discussion of Amiel's debts to

Germany Let us take up the biographical thread again In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and

he returned to Geneva "How many places, how many impressions, observations, thoughts how many forms

of men and things have passed before me and in me since April, 1843," he writes in the Journal, two or threemonths after his return "The last seven years have been the most important of my life; they have been thenovitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being." The first literary evidence of his maturedpowers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on Berlin, which he contributed to the

_Bibliothèque Universelle_ in 1848, apparently just before he left Germany Here for the first time we havethe Amiel of the "Journal Intime." The young man who five years before had written his painstaking review of

M Rio is now in his turn a master He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous prose atcommand, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm andcriticism in his description of the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital whichrepresents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of mind A great deal, of course, in the two papers

is technical and statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good that one is tempted tomake some melancholy comparisons between them and another article in the _Bibliothèque_, that on AdolphePictet, written in 1856, and from which we have already quoted In 1848 Amiel was for awhile master of hispowers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the accumulating and

producing faculties; he writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations Eight years laterthe reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which represents the practical side of the

intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls "awavering manner, born of doubt and scruple."

How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life which lay before him at the moment of hisreappearance at Geneva in 1848! "My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to me," says M.Scherer "He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Germany laden with science, but he wore hisknowledge lightly, his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoiled the

favorable impression he made on the bystander the whole effect, indeed, was of something brilliant andstriking In his young alertness Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have said thefuture was all his own."

His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure him at once an important position inhis native town After a public competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and French

literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four years, exchanging it for the professorship

of moral philosophy in 1854 Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it wouldhave seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the fulland fruitful development of his gifts Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the foundation and support,was to be the stumbling block of his career Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment.After a long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November, 1841, the Radical party, led byJames Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the Conservatives that is to say, the governing class, which had ruledthe republic since the Restoration from power And with the advent of the democratic constitution of 1846,and the exclusion of the old Genevese families from the administration they had so long monopolized, anumber of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the ultimate success of Radicalism than thechange in political machinery introduced by the new constitution Among them was the disappearance ofalmost the whole existing staff of the academy, then and now the center of Genevese education, and up to

1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely tohamper the Radical order of things

Of these new men Amiel was one He had been absent from Geneva during the years of conflict which hadpreceded Fazy's triumph; he seems to have had no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeatedside, and as M Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post at the hands of the new government,two years after the violent measures which had marked its accession, without breaking any pledges or

sacrificing any convictions But none the less the step was a fatal one M Renan is so far in the right If anytimely friend had at that moment succeeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot tempted Rossi in 1833,there can be little question that the young professor's after life would have been happier and saner As it was,Amiel threw himself into the competition for the chair, was appointed professor, and then found himself in ahopelessly false position, placed on the threshold of life, in relations and surroundings for which he was

radically unfitted, and cut off by no fault of his own from the milieu to which he rightly belonged, and in

which his sensitive individuality might have expanded normally and freely For the defeated upper class verynaturally shut their doors on the nominees of the new _régime_, and as this class represented at that momentalmost everything that was intellectually distinguished in Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly speaking, ofthe scientific and literary traditions of the little state, we can easily imagine how galling such a social

ostracism must have been to the young professor, accustomed to the stimulating atmosphere, the commonintellectual interests of Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than the ordinary craving of youth for

sympathy and for affection In a great city, containing within it a number of different circles of life, Amielwould easily have found his own circle, nor could political discords have affected his social comfort to

anything like the same extent But in a town not much larger than Oxford, and in which the cultured class hadhitherto formed a more or less homogeneous and united whole, it was almost impossible for Amiel to escapefrom his grievance and establish a sufficient barrier of friendly interests between himself and the societywhich ignored him There can be no doubt that he suffered, both in mind and character, from the struggle theposition involved He had no natural sympathy with radicalism His taste, which was extremely fastidious, hisjudgment, his passionate respect for truth, were all offended by the noise, the narrowness, the dogmatism ofthe triumphant democracy So that there was no making up on the one side for what he had lost on the other,and he proudly resigned himself to an isolation and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they did, certain nativeweaknesses of character, had the most unfortunate effect upon his life

In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years after his election he allows himself a few pathetic words,half of accusation, half of self-reproach, which make us realize how deeply this untowardness of socialcircumstance had affected him He is discussing one of Madame de Stặl's favorite words, the word

consideration "What is _consideration_?" he asks "How does a man obtain it? how does it differ from fame,

esteem, admiration?" And then he turns upon himself "It is curious, but the idea of consideration has been to

me so little of a motive that I have not even been conscious of such an idea But ought I not to have beenconscious of it?" he asks himself anxiously "ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion ofothers, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiledupon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill But to

hunt down consideration and reputation to force the esteem of others seemed to me an effort unworthy ofmyself, almost a degradation A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all thewhile my heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have beensystematically and deliberately isolated Untimely despair and the deepest discouragement have been myconstant portion Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon

as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me A hermit against my will, I have not evenfound peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart."

Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel's His social difficulties represent rather adull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes,produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public career, than anything very tragicand acute They were real, and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and conquer them.But he had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes, like other men "He had anelasticity of mind," says M Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, "which reacted against

vexations from without, and his cheerfulness was readily restored by conversation and the society of a fewkindred spirits We were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Salève,

Lamartine's _Salève aux flancs azurés_; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall." They were daysdevoted to _débauches platoniciennes_, to "the free exchange of ideas, the free play of fancy and of gayety.Amiel was not one of the original members of these Thursday parties; but whenever he joined us we regarded

it as a fête-day In serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and his energy, his entrain, affected

us all If his grammatical questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, astonished us at times, howoften, on the other hand, did he not give us cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the precision of hisideas, the charm of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly and amiable, a nature onemight trust and lean upon with perfect security He awakened in us but one regret; _we could not understandhow it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities_."

In these last words of M Scherer's we have come across the determining fact of Amiel's life in its relation tothe outer world that "sterility of genius," of which he was the victim For social ostracism and politicalanxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if he could but have lost himself in the fruitfulactivities of thought, in the struggles and the victories of composition and creation A German professor of

Amiel's knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine men out of ten in his

circumstances would have made themselves the slave of a magnum opus, and forgotten the vexations of everyday life in the "douces joies de la science." But there were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it

impossible which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as hispublic performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure What were these characteristics, this element ofunsoundness and disease, which M Caro calls "_la maladie de l'idéal_?"

Before we can answer the question we must go back a little and try to realize the intellectual and moralequipment of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M Scherer to have the world at his feet Whatwere the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with him from Berlin? In the first place,

an omnivorous desire to know: "Amiel," says M Scherer, "read everything." In the second, an extraordinarypower of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise ofhis power Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold critical instinct "he came tohis desk as to an altar." "A friend who knew him well," says M Scherer, "remembers having heard him speakwith deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced during his years in Germanywhenever, in the early morning before dawn, with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself

penetrating once more into the region of pure thought, 'conversing with ideas, enjoying the inmost life ofthings.'" "Thought," he says somewhere in the Journal, "is like opium It can intoxicate us and yet leave usbroad awake." To this intoxication of thought he seems to have been always specially liable, and his Germanexperience unbalanced, as such an experience generally is with a young man, by family life, or by anyhealthy commonplace interests and pleasures developed the intellectual passion in him to an abnormaldegree For four years he had devoted himself to the alternate excitement and satisfaction of this passion He

had read enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of any imperative claim on the practical side ofhim, the accumulative, reflective faculties had grown out of all proportion to the rest of the personality Norhad any special subject the power to fix him Had he been in France, what Sainte-Beuve calls the French

"_imagination de détail_" would probably have attracted his pliant, responsive nature, and he would havefound happy occupation in some one of the innumerable departments of research on which the French havebeen patiently spending their analytical gift since that general widening of horizons which accompanied andgave value to the Romantic movement But instead he was at Berlin, in the center of that speculative fermentwhich followed the death of Hegel and the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of different andconflicting sections of philosophical opinion He was under the spell of German synthesis, of that traditional,involuntary effort which the German mind makes, generation after generation, to find the unity of experience,

to range its accumulations from life and thought under a more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive,formula Not this study or that study, not this detail or that, but the whole of things, the sum of Knowledge,the Infinite, the Absolute, alone had value or reality In his own words: "There is no repose for the mindexcept in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine Nothing finite is true,

is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels

me There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole ofBeing."

It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; he had a strong natural aptitude for it, and his

knowledge was wide and real; but detail was ultimately valuable to him, not in itself, but as food for a

speculative hunger, for which, after all, there is no real satisfaction All the pleasant paths which traverse thekingdom of Knowledge, in which so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amielstraight into the wilderness of abstract speculation And the longer he lingered in the wilderness, unchecked

by any sense of intellectual responsibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the stranger and the weirdergrew the hallucinations of thought The Journal gives marvelous expression to them: "I can find no words forwhat I feel My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing It seems

to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery,and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age." Or again: "I am a spectator, so to speak, of themolecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an

irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me and this phenomenology of myself serves as

a window opened upon the mystery of the world I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentratedupon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears the impetuous passage oftime, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity After all the bewilderingdistractions of life after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitiveexistence, yet without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion I come again upon the fathomlessabyss, the silent and melancholy cavern, where dwell '_Die Mütter_,' where sleeps that which neither lives nordies, which has neither movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all else passesaway."

Wonderful sentences! "_Prodiges de la pensée speculative, décrits dans une langue non moins prodigieuse_,"

as M Scherer says of the innumerable passages which describe either this intoxication of the infinite, or thevarious forms and consequences of that deadening of personality which the abstract processes of thought tend

to produce But it is easy to understand that a man in whom experiences of this kind become habitual is likely

to lose his hold upon the normal interests of life What are politics or literature to such a mind but fragmentswithout real importance dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which neither language nor institutions

provide any adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative andtemporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's selfseriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision ofuniversal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor

of everything relative and phenomenal is gone A man may go on talking, teaching, writing but the spring ofpersonal action is broken; his actions are like the actions of a somnambulist

No doubt to some extent this mood is familiar to all minds endowed with the true speculative genius Thephilosopher has always tended to become unfit for practical life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comicmotives, so to speak, of literature But a mood which, in the great majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and iseasily kept within bounds by the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel almostconstant, and the natural impulse of the human animal toward healthy movement and a normal play of

function, never very strong in him, was gradually weakened and destroyed by an untoward combination ofcircumstances The low health from which he suffered more or less from his boyhood, and then the depressinginfluences of the social difficulties we have described, made it more and more difficult for the rest of theorganism to react against the tyranny of the brain And as the normal human motives lost their force, what hecalls "the Buddhist tendency in me" gathered strength year by year, until, like some strange misgrowth, it hadabsorbed the whole energies and drained the innermost life-blood of the personality which had developed it.And the result is another soul's tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which throws fresh light on themysterious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned thegeneration of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual dangers come intobeing, and that across the path of continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many a

selva oscura, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it The story of the "Journal

Intime" is a story to make us think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature likeAmiel's, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of vision and ofreproduction which the intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many respects so realand so splendid, and produces results so stirring often to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in theend we put down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of gratitude The individualerror and suffering is almost forgotten; all that we can realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the

quickened sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled and solitary thinker whose via dolorosa is

before us

The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel's lifesupplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity It is a pitiful story Amiel might have been saved fromdespair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mentalhabit of his this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of such a tyranny, acritical sense of abnormal acuteness stood between him and everything healing and restoring "I am afraid of

an imperfect, a faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and from loyalty." "As soon as athing attracts me I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discoveranything which satisfies my aspiration The real disgusts me, and I cannot find the ideal." And so one thingafter another is put away Family life attracted him perpetually "I cannot escape," he writes, "from the ideal of

it A companion, of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within a common worship toward theworld outside kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations whichdevelop round the first all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes." But in vain "Reality, the present, theirreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me I have too much imagination, conscience, and

penetration and not enough character _The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity andimmensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid._ I am distrustful of myselfand of happiness because I know myself The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession And I abhoruseless regrets and repentance."

It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work He protects the intellectual freedom, as it were, of hisstudents with the same jealousy as he protects his own There shall be no oratorical device, no persuading, nocajoling of the mind this way or that "A professor is the priest of his subject, and should do the honors of itgravely and with dignity." And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an eloquence and a poetry,capable of illuminating the most difficult and abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry

compendium of universal knowledge "Led by his passion for the whole," says M Scherer, "Amiel offered hishearers, not so much a series of positive teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework what the Germans

call a Schematismus The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and lent itself

admirably to a certain kind of analysis and demonstration; but it was a skeleton flesh, body, and life were

So that as a professor he made no mark He was conscientiousness itself in whatever he conceived to be hisduty But with all the critical and philosophical power which, as we know from the Journal, he might havelavished on his teaching, had the conditions been other than they were, the study of literature, and the study ofphilosophy as such, owe him nothing But for the Journal his years of training and his years of teaching wouldhave left equally little record behind them "His pupils at Geneva," writes one who was himself among thenumber, [Footnote: M Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of International Law at the University of Brussels.]

"never learned to appreciate him at his true worth We did justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it waswide, to his vast stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had brought back withhim from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence, his kindly wit But I look back without any sense ofpleasure to his lectures."

Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family life, and has found himself

incapable of teaching effectively what he knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field ofliterary production And here indeed we come to the strangest feature in Amiel's career his literary sterility.That he possessed literary power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the "Journal Intime."

Knowledge, insight, eloquence, critical power all were his And the impulse to produce, which is the natural,though by no means the invariable, accompaniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly strong in himalso For the "Journal Intime" runs to 17,000 folio pages of MS., and his half dozen volumes of poems, thoughthe actual quantity is not large, represent an amount of labor which would have more than carried him throughsome serious piece of critical or philosophical work, and so enabled him to content the just expectations of hisworld He began to write early, as is proved by the fact that at twenty he was a contributor to the best literaryperiodical which Geneva possessed He was a charming correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstractthought, his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the activities of the day politics, religious organizations,literature, art was of the keenest kind And yet at the time of his death all that this fine critic and profoundthinker had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a fewvolumes of poems which had had no effect except on a small number of sympathetic friends; a few pages of_pensées_ intermingled with the poems, and, as we now know, extracted from the Journal; and four or fivescattered essays, the length of magazine articles, on Mme de Stặl, Rousseau, the history of the Academy ofGeneva, the literature of French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And more than this, the production, such as

it was, had been a production born of effort and difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, onmetrical experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the occasional affectations of the prosestyle, might well have convinced the critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the offspringcould have no real importance, no profitable message, for the world

The whole "Journal Intime" is in some sense Amiel's explanation of these facts In it he has made full andbitter confession of his weakness, his failure; he has endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other handcan rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to himself and others "To love, to dream,

to feel, to learn, to understand all these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from willing I have asort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it

dependent on external things and aims The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening tothe passage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire and

to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute." It is the result of what he himself calls_"l'éblouissement de l'infini_." He no sooner makes a step toward production, toward action and the

realization of himself, than a vague sense of peril overtakes him The inner life, with its boundless horizonsand its indescribable exaltations, seems endangered Is he not about to place between himself and the forms ofspeculative truth some barrier of sense and matter to give up the real for the apparent, the substance for theshadow? One is reminded of Clough's cry under a somewhat similar experience:

"If this pure solace should desert my mind, What were all else? I dare not risk the loss To the old paths, mysoul!"

And in close combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency which carries a man toward thecontemplative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical sense the tendency which, in the realm ofaction and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, _"droit au défaut,"_ and makes himconscious at once of the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an action It is another aspect of thesame idiosyncrasy "The point I have reached seems to be explained by a too restless search for perfection, bythe abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words.Confidence and spontaneity of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no longer act." For abuse

of the critical faculty brings with it its natural consequences timidity of soul, paralysis of the will, completeself-distrust "To know is enough for me; expression seems to me often a profanity What I lack is character,will, individuality." "By what mystery," he writes to M Scherer, "do others expect much from me? whereas I

feel myself to be incapable of anything serious or important." _Défiance_ and impuissance are the words

constantly on his lips "My friends see what I might have been; I see what I am."

And yet the literary instinct remains, and must in some way be satisfied And so he takes refuge in what he

himself calls scales, exercises, tours de force in verse-translation of the most laborious and difficult kind, in

ingenious _vers d'occasion_, in metrical experiments and other literary trifling, as his friends think it, of thesame sort "I am afraid of greatness I am not afraid of ingenuity; all my published literary essays are little elsethan studies, games, exercises, for the purpose of testing myself I play scales, as it were; I run up and down

my instrument I train my hand and make sure of its capacity and skill But the work itself remains

unachieved I am always preparing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in a kind ofbarren curiosity."

Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is stronger than he all at once His sense of duty rebels, hisconscience suffers, and he makes resolution after resolution to shake himself free from the mental traditionwhich had taken such hold upon him to write, to produce, to satisfy his friends In 1861, a year after M.Scherer had left Geneva, Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and his discouragements, and asking,

as one may ask an old friend of one's youth, for help and counsel M Scherer, much touched by the appeal,answered it plainly and frankly described the feeling of those who knew him as they watched his life slippingaway unmarked by any of the achievements of which his youth had given promise, and pointed out variousliterary openings in which, if he were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed To begin with, he urgedhim to join the _Revue Germanique,_ then being started by Charles Dollfus, Renan, Littré, and others Amielleft the letter for three months unanswered and then wrote a reply which M Scherer probably received with asigh of impatience For, rightly interpreted, it meant that old habits were too strong, and that the momentaryimpulse had died away When, a little later, "Les Etrangères," a collection of verse-translations, came out, itwas dedicated to M Scherer, who did not, however, pretend to give it any very cordial reception Amiel tookhis friend's coolness in very good part, calling him his "dear Rhadamanthus." "How little I knew!" cries M.Scherer "What I regret is to have discovered too late by means of the Journal, the key to a problem whichseemed to me hardly serious, and which I now feel to have been tragic A kind of remorse seizes me that I wasnot able to understand my friend better, and to soothe his suffering by a sympathy which would have been amixture of pity and admiration."

Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his revanche that he knew the value of all those sheets of

Journal which were slowly accumulating under his hand? Did he say to himself sometimes: "My friends arewrong; my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given expression to them in the only way possible to

me, and when I die it will be found that I too, like other men, have performed the task appointed me, andcontributed my quota to the human store?" It is clear that very early he began to regard it as possible thatportions of the Journal should be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he left certain "literaryinstructions," dated seven years before his last illness, in which his executors were directed to publish suchparts of it as might seem to them to possess any general interest But it is clear also that the Journal was not, inany sense, written for publication "These pages," say the Geneva editors, "written _au courant de la

plume_ sometimes in the morning, but more often at the end of the day, without any idea of composition or

publicity are marked by the repetition, the lacunae, the carelessness, inherent in this kind of monologue The

thoughts and sentiments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of rendering."

And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in general, a low one, especially during thedepression and discouragement of his later years "This Journal of mine," he writes in 1876, "represents thematerial of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful tonobody, and even for myself it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice it." And again: "Is

everything I have produced, taken together my correspondence, these thousands of Journal pages, my

lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds anything better than withered leaves? To whomand to what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything toanybody? A life of no account! When all is added up nothing!" In passages like these there is no anticipation

of any posthumous triumph over the disapproval of his friends and the criticism of his fellow-citizens TheJournal was a relief, the means of satisfying a need of expression which otherwise could find no outlet; "agrief-cheating device," but nothing more It did not still the sense of remorse for wasted gifts and

opportunities which followed poor Amiel through the painful months of his last illness Like Keats, he passedaway, feeling that all was over, and the great game of life lost forever

It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and impressions of a different kind from those which we havebeen dwelling on, which may serve to complete and correct the picture we have so far drawn of the author ofthe Journal For Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, which, are indeed one great source of his

attractiveness Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been describing, he would never

have touched our feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is that there was in him a fond of

heredity, a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the

intellect and its accumulations In his hours of intellectual concentration he freed himself from all trammels ofcountry or society, or even, as he insists, from all sense of personality But at other times he was the dutifulson of a country which he loved, taking a warm interest in everything Genevese, especially in everything thatrepresented the older life of the town When it was a question of separating the Genevese state from thechurch, which had been the center of the national life during three centuries of honorable history, Amiel thephilosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on to the side of the opponents of separation, andrejoiced in their victory A large proportion of his poems deal with national subjects He was one of the firstmembers of "_L'Institut Genevois_," founded in 1853, and he took a warm interest in the movement started by

M Eugene Rambert toward 1870, for the improvement of secondary education throughout French-speakingSwitzerland One of his friends dwells with emphasis on his "_sens profond des nationalités, des langues, desvilles_" on his love for local characteristics, for everything deep-rooted in the past, and helping to sustain thepresent He is convinced that no state can live and thrive without a certain number of national prejudices,without _à priori_ beliefs and traditions It pleases him to see that there is a force in the Genevese nationalitywhich resists the leveling influences of a crude radicalism; it rejoices him that Geneva "has not yet become amere copy of anything, and that she is still capable of deciding for herself Those who say to her, 'Do as they

do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,' are still in the minority The doctrinaires who would split her up

and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away I like thisproof of vitality."

His love of traveling never left him Paris attracted him, as it attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained atone time or another a certain amount of acquaintance with French literary men In 1852 we find him for a timebrought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais, Béranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred

de Vigny and Théophile Gautier There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier in his first publishedvolume of 1854 He revisited Italy and his old haunts and friends in Germany more than once, and in generalkept the current of his life fresh and vigorous by his openness to impressions and additions from without

He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, "taking pains with the smallest note," and within a smallcircle of friends much liked His was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value; the motiveswhich governed his life were too remote from the ordinary motives of human conduct, and his characteristicsjust those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of

minds Probably, too especially in his later years there was a certain amount of self-consciousness andartificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we havedescribed, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity ofnature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal So that he was by no means generally popular,and the great success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who knew him merely as afellow-citizen and acquaintance But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student,whose manners were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself delightful to those whounderstood him, or those who looked to him for affection "According to my remembrance of him," writes M.Scherer, "he was bright, sociable, a charming companion Others who knew him better and longer than I saythe same The mobility of his disposition counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling In spite of hisfits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the end he was young, a child even, amused bymere nothings; and whoever had heard him laugh his hearty student's laugh would have found it difficult toidentify him with the author of so many somber pages." M Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as "strongand active, still handsome, delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused." Indeed, if the

photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something specially attractive in the sensitive,expressive face, with its lofty brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth It is the face of a poet rather than of astudent, and makes one understand certain other little points which his friends lay stress on for instance, hislove for and popularity with children

In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side finds more expression, proportionally, than inthe Journal In the volume called "Grains de Mil," published in 1854, and containing verse written betweenthe ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, andnow to famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with in passing, which, read side

by side with the "Journal Intime," bring a certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise somber picture Amielwas never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never reachesthe glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal It has ability,

thought beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which aGeorge Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplacemetaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns Still as Amiel's work, his poetry has aninterest for those who are interested in him Sincerity is written in every line of it Most of the thoughts andexperiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated in it; the same joys, the same

aspirations, the same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressedwith the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of itself And everynow and then the poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to thefine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to hisyounger sister:

"Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur; Treize ans!

et dans ce jour mil regard de ton père Ne fera d'allégresse épanouir ton coeur

"Orpheline, c'est là le nom dont tu t'appelles, Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé; De la couvée, hélas!seuls, trois petits, sans ailes Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé

"Et, semés par l'éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines, Un même toit encor n'a pu les abriter, Et du foyer natal,malgré leurs plaintes vaines Dieu, peut-être longtemps, voudra les écarter

"Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes alarmes, Qu'un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir; Une main dans

le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes; Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir."

The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much poetical promise But the pathetic image

of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, "_un nid que la foudre a brisé_," which it calls up, and the tone ofbrotherly affection, linger in one's memory And through much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to "My

Godson," or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had swornhim eternal friendship over Gretchen's game of "_Er liebt mich liebt mich nicht_," one hears the same tendernote.

"Merci, prophétique fleurette, Corolle à l'oracle vainqueur, Car voilà trois ans, paquerette, Que tu m'ouvris unpetit coeur

"Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, L'enfant aux grands yeux de velours Maintient son petit coeur fidèle, Fidèlecomme aux premiers jours."

His last poetical volume, "Jour à Jour," published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic intone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting But though the dominant note is one

of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective,there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and hisfriends And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what GeorgeSand calls "_les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l'oeil ne voit point_" is very great Amiel published it ayear before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest andmost intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form Faith, doubt, submission,

tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the

life of the religious soul they are all here, and the Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor

Amiel's epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he hadsuffered much and achieved comparatively so little

"Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur Attaché nos coeurs à la terre;Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l'important, Mille choses pour nous ont du prix et pourtant Une seuleétait nécessaire

"Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux; Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos En nousquelque chose soupire; Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, Nous vondrions nous faire une fouled'amis Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire

"Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progrès Sur sa toile dePénélope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J'ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je metrompais; Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe."

Upon the small remains of Amiel's prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell The two essays onMadame de Stặl and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as anappendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the "Pensées," published in the latter half of thevolume containing the "Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation But in general, whatever he himselfpublished was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and no one was more conscious of thefact than himself

The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which filled the last seven years of his life, isabundantly told in the Journal we must not repeat it here He had never been a strong man, and at fifty-three

he received, at his doctor's hands, his _arrêt de mort_ We are told that what killed him was "heart disease,complicated by disease of the larynx," and that he suffered "much and long." He was buried in the cemetery ofClarens, not far from his great contemporary Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend providedthe monument which now marks his resting-place

We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present available for the description ofAmiel's life and relations toward the outside world It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of hismemory has been specially committed may see their way in the future, if not to a formal biography, which is

very likely better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the "Journal Intime,"

as Joubert's "Correspondence" completes the "Pensées." There must be ample material for it; and Amiel'sletters would probably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his mind produced sofreely and so well, as long as there was no question of publication, but which is at present somewhat

overweighted in the "Journal Intime."

But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the Journal remains and the Journal isthe important matter We shall read the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal'ssake The man himself, as poet, teacher, and _littérateur_, produced no appreciable effect on his generation;but the posthumous record of his inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over Europe, and won him aniche in the House of Fame What are the reasons for this striking transformation of a man's position atransformation which, as M Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary history? In other words,what has given the "Journal Intime" its sudden and unexpected success?

In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of manner that fine literary expression in whichAmiel has been able to clothe the subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of religious feeling, orthe aspects of natural scenery Style is what gives value and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all hisGermanisms, has style of the best kind He possesses in prose that indispensable magic which he lacks inpoetry

His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central French tradition Probably a Frenchmanwill be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Tưpffer, to Amielhimself: "_C'est ainsi qu'on écrit dans les littératures qui n'ont point de capitale, de quartier général classique,

ou d'Académie; c'est ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Américain, ou même un Anglais, use à son gré de sa langue

En France au contraire, ó il y a une Académie Française on doit trouver qu'un tel style est une très-grandenouveauté et le succés qu'il a obtenu un evènement: il a fallu bien des circonstances pour y préparer_." Nodoubt the preparatory circumstance in Amiel's case has been just that Germanization of the French mind onwhich M Taine and M Bourget dwell with so much emphasis But, be this as it may, there is no mistakingthe enthusiasm with which some of the best living writers of French have hailed these pages instinct, as onedeclares, "with a strange and marvelous poetry;" full of phrases "_d'une intense suggestion de beauté_;"according to another Not that the whole of the Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity There are acertain number of passages where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the technical philosopher; thereare others, though not many, into which a certain German heaviness and diffuseness has crept, dulling theedge of the sentences, and retarding the development of the thought When all deductions have been made,however, Amiel's claim is still first and foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man whosethought uses at will the harmonies and resources of speech, and who has attained, in words of his own, "to thefull and masterly expression of himself."

Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book to penetrate, _faire sa trouée_, as theFrench say, we must add its extraordinary psychological interest Both as poet and as psychologist, Amielmakes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name to the list of those who have won a hearingfrom their fellows as interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself He is the successor of St.Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of Obermann and Maurice de Guérin What others have done for thespiritual life of other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the wealth of poetical, scientific,and psychological faculty which he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptionsplaces him so far as the present century is concerned at the head of the small and delicately-gifted class towhich he belongs For beside his spiritual experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de Guérin's apassing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romanticbeauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its

primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the "Fragment on the Ranz desVaches," the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchâtel these various pictures are the work of one of themost finished artists in words that literature has produced But how true George Sand's criticism is! "_Chez

Obermann la sensibilité est active, l'intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante._" He has a certain antiquepower of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive No one can write more poetical exercises than he

on the old text of pulvis et umbra sumus, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him As soon as he

leaves the region of romantic description how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, "_unergoteur Voltairien_;" instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism!Intellectually, the ground gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought Above all, thescientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest andbest, dealing at will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth,

Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, anddiscussing Christianity in the tone of the "Encyclopédie."

Maurice de Guérin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language of feeling, a poet as Amiel and

Senancour are His love of nature, the earth-passion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strangesavor, a force and flame which is all his own Beside his actual sense of community with the visible world,Amiel's love of landscape has a tame, didactic air The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a merevehicle of moral or philosophical thought; Maurice de Guérin loves her for herself alone, and has found words

to describe her influence over him of extraordinary individuality and power But for the rest the story of hisinner life has but small value in the history of thought His difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle isintellectually not serious enough we see in it only a common incident of modern experience poetically told; itthrows no light on the genesis and progress of the great forces which are molding and renovating the thought

of the present it tells us nothing for the future

No there is much more in the "Journal Intime" than the imagination or the poetical glow which Amiel shareswith his immediate predecessors in the art of confession-writing His book is representative of human

experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an extent hardly equaled since Rousseau For his study

of himself is only a means to an end "What interests me in myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case

a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human

consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation its relation toward the infinite and theunknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it which is the real subject of the

"Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not madevocal in these pages Amiel's intellectual interest is untiring Philosophy, science, letters, art he has

penetrated the spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide range of modern

activities which he has not at one time or other felt the attraction of, and learned in some sense to understand

"Amiel," says M Renan, "has his defects, but he was certainly one of the strongest speculative heads who,during the period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected on the nature of things." And, although a certain fatalspiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of practical life, his sympathy with action,whether it was the action of the politician or the social reformer, or merely that steady half-conscious

performance of its daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was unfailing His horizon was notbounded by his own "prison-cell," or by that dream-world which he has described with so much subtle beauty;rather the energies which should have found their natural expression in literary or family life, pent up withinthe mind itself, excited in it a perpetual eagerness for intellectual discovery, and new powers of sympathywith whatever crossed its field of vision

So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find himself at home with Amiel The power of organizing his

thought, the art of writing a book, monumentum aere perennius, was indeed denied him he laments it bitterly;

but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself, responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catchingand reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing from the hills of thought

And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the religious minds, the natures for whom God and duty arethe foundation of existence Here, indeed, we come to the innermost secret of Amiel's charm, the fact whichprobably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination for a large and growing class of readers For,while he represents all the intellectual complexities of a time bewildered by the range and number of its own

acquisitions, the religious instinct in him is as strong and tenacious as in any of the representative exponents

of the life of faith The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings to old traditions, and steadiesitself on the rock of duty His Calvinistic training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the

Hegelian school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of personal need, his

preoccupation with the idea of "sin." "He speaks," says M Renan contemptuously, "of sin, of salvation, ofredemption, and conversion, as if these things were realities He asks me 'What does M Renan make of sin?'_Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime_." But it is just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems ofevil and responsibility, and M Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant, half-skeptical smile, that M.Renan's "Souvenirs" inform and entertain us, while the "Journal Intime" makes a deep impression on thatmoral sense which is at the root of individual and national life

The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal religion Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot

be replaced by philosophy The redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of the heart The

philosopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that the various definite forms into which the religiousthought of man has thrown itself throughout history are not absolute truth, but only the temporary creations of

a need which gradually and surely outgrows them all "The Trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell, maycease to be dogmas and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away the question of humanityremains: What is it which saves?" Amiel's answer to the question will recall to a wide English circle themethod and spirit of an English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many a heart, and is guidingmany an effort in the cause of good the method and spirit of the late Professor Green of Balliol In manyrespects there was a gulf of difference between the two men The one had all the will and force of personalitywhich the other lacked But the ultimate creed of both, the way in which both interpret the facts of nature andconsciousness, is practically the same In Amiel's case, we have to gather it through all the variations andinevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series

of ideas, but the main results are clear enough Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope which springsfrom duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil Conscience andthe moral progress of the race these are his points of departure Faith in the reality of the moral law is what

he clings to when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the intellect, and after all the storms ofpessimism and necessitarianism have passed over him The reconciliation of the two certitudes, the twomethods, the scientific and the religious, "is to be sought for in that moral law which is also a fact, and everystep of which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Nature is the

virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity." Consciousness is the one fixedpoint in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul's inward law, as it has been painfullyelaborated by human history, the only revelation of God

The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a reasonable creed is the key to all else the cluewhich leads the mind safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the Eternal Without

attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief

in "a holy will at the root of nature and destiny" for "if man is capable of conceiving goodness, the generalprinciple of things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good." And then the religious consciousnessseizes on this intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in the tender and beautiful

language of faith "There is but one thing needful to possess God All our senses, all our powers of mind andsoul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of tasting and adoring God Religion is not

a method; it is a life a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a

communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happinesswhich overflows." And the faith of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and supports himthrough his last hours He writes a few months before the end: "The animal expires; man surrenders his soul tothe author of the soul." "We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-placealone But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God And so what was an austeremonologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense ofpainful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty" _"Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe."_

Nor is this all It is not only that Amiel's inmost thought and affections are stayed on this conception of "aholy will at the root of nature and destiny" in a certain very real sense he is a Christian No one is moresensitive than he to the contribution which Christianity has made to the religious wealth of mankind; no onemore penetrated than he with the truth of its essential doctrine "death unto sin and a new birth unto

righteousness." "The religion of sin, of repentance and reconciliation," he cries, "the religion of the new birthand of eternal life, is not a religion to be ashamed of." The world has found inspiration and guidance foreighteen centuries in the religious consciousness of Jesus "The gospel has modified the world and consoledmankind," and so "we may hold aloof from the churches and yet bow ourselves before Jesus We may besuspicious of the clergy and refuse to have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Justwho came to save and not to curse." And in fact Amiel's whole life and thought are steeped in Christianity He

is the spiritual descendant of one of the intensest and most individual forms of Christian belief, and traces ofhis religious ancestry are visible in him at every step Protestantism of the sincerer and nobler kind leaves anindelible impression on the nature which has once surrounded itself to the austere and penetrating influencesflowing from the religion of sin and grace; and so far as feeling and temperament are concerned, Amielretained throughout his life the marks of Calvinism and Geneva

And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties of thought, and in the face of the soul'sdearest memories and most passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached itsmaturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims of the religion which by instinct and inheritance heloves; he makes no compromise with dogma or with miracle Beyond the religions of the present he seesalways the essential religion which lasts when all local forms and marvels have passed away; and as years go

on, with more and more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as

"prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;" misgrowths of thought, necessary in theirtime and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man

And it is just here in this mixture of the faith which clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy whichallows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for truth, whichwill allow nothing to interfere between thought and its appointed tasks that Amiel's special claim upon uslies It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the modern mind of itsdoubts, its convictions, its hopes He speaks for the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken forit; in his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining toward the unseen and theideal which gives a fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched withdoubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it; more widely conscious than itspredecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's physical environment;but at the same time paradox as it may seem more conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by thespectacle of the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe

And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and ofhimself! He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much incommon; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were, from a height to thecrowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what they have to say And here again he represents the presentand foreshadows the future For the age of the preachers is passing those who speak with authority on theriddles of life and nature as the priests of this or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming less important asknowledge spreads, and the complexity of experience is made evident to a wider range of minds The force of

things is against the certain people Again and again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by mortal

hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pursuit she will pay more and more respectful heed to voiceslike this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker with its pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moralsteadfastness which is the inmost note of it to these meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow ofthought, and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in newforms, and proclaim to us in new words,

"The mighty hopes which make us men."

AMIEL'S JOURNAL.

* * * * *

[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as the author's place of residence.]

BERLIN, July 16 1848. There is but one thing needful to possess God All our senses, all our powers ofmind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes oftasting and of adoring God We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bindourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a usufruct Toadore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven.Let come what come will even death Only be at peace with self, live in the presence of God, in communionwith Him, and leave the guidance of existence to those universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing!

If death gives me time, so much the better If its summons is near, so much the better still; if a half-deathovertake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find openingbefore me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation Every life has its potentiality of greatness,and as it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him

BERLIN, July 20, 1848. It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from thepoint of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from thepoint of view of astronomy When the duration of a man's life or of a people's life appears to us as

microscopic as that of a fly and inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body, with all itsdust of nations, we feel ourselves at once very small and very great, and we are able, as it were, to surveyfrom the height of the spheres our own existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind All other subjects may bereduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study

GENEVA, April 20, 1849. It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva for Paris and Berlin in April, 1848,the preceding year, 1841-42, having been spent in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva How manyjourneys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have since thenpassed before me and in me! The last seven years have been the most important of my life: they have been thenovitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being

Three snowstorms this afternoon Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach trees! What a difference from sixyears ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers,smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into

my face!

May 3, 1849. I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness

I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen.This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs What dreams Ihave are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living Recognize yourplace; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling andideas; you will be most useful so Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as

it comes Bring God down into your heart Embalm your soul in Him now, make within you a temple for theHoly Spirit, be diligent in good works, make others happier and better

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever mayhappen to you

May 27, 1849. To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life It is thesecret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelesttrial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if Godcould suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him He also He above all is thegreat misunderstood, the least comprehended Alas! alas! never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient,sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always, like God; to lovealways this is duty.

June 3, 1849. Fresh and delicious weather A long morning walk Surprised the hawthorn and wild rose-trees

in flower From the fields vague and health-giving scents The Voirons fringed with dazzling mists, and tints

of exquisite softness over the Salève Work in the fields, two delightful donkeys, one pulling greedily at ahedge of barberry Then three little children I felt a boundless desire to caress and play with them To be able

to enjoy such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine weather, contentment; to have my two sisters with me; to rest

my eyes on balmy meadows and blossoming orchards; to listen to the life singing in the grass and on the trees;

to be so calmly happy is it not too much? is it deserved? O let me enjoy it with gratitude The days of troublecome soon enough and are many enough I have no presentiment of happiness All the more let me profit bythe present Come, kind nature, smile and enchant me! Veil from me awhile my own griefs and those ofothers; let me see only the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide all miserable and ignoble things from meunder thy bounties and splendors!

October 1, 1849. Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts from the gospel of St John It

confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do

is to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic reactions through which it comes to us,and which alter it more or less A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has beenbroken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand directions It is the historical task of

Christianity to assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever spiritualizing moreand more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which still exists nineteen centuries afterthe Redeemer's proclamation, "it is the letter which killeth" after his protest against a dead symbolism Thenew religion is so profound that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greaternumber of Christians The person of Christ is the center of it Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity,propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell all these beliefs have been so materialized andcoarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning andyet carnally interpreted Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which

is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid Whether we will or no, there is an esotericdoctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as

Angelus, [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Soheffler, the German seventeenth century

hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's

translations in the Lyra Germanica.] I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He

sees me."

Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would haveborne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase "ye are gods," and so would St.Paul, who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our century wants a new theology that is to say, a moreprofound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity

* * * * *

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of

suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death There is no serious piety without heroism.Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage

I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.

I have just been looking through the complete works of Montesquieu, and cannot yet make plain to myselfthe impression left on me by this singular style, with its mixture of gravity and affectation, of carelessness andprecision, of strength and delicacy; so full of sly intention for all its coldness, expressing at once

inquisitiveness and indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like notes thrown together haphazard, and yet deliberate Iseem to see an intelligence naturally grave and austere donning a dress of wit for convention's sake Theauthor desires to entertain as much as to teach, the thinker is also a _bel-esprit_, the jurisconsult has a touch ofthe coxcomb, and a perfumed breath from the temple of Venus has penetrated the tribunal of Minos Here wehave austerity, as the century understood it, in philosophy or religion In Montesquieu, the art, if there is any,lies not in the words but in the matter The words run freely and lightly, but the thought is self-conscious

* * * * *

Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the souleach feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiantkingship Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but aninstant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all itsbrilliancy and all its greatness culminate Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas

or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point Before it, youhave but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them After it you will have only weakened reminiscence orpowerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury conscious of its impotence

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh andinstinct To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book To learn new habits iseverything, for it is to reach the substance of life Life is but a tissue of habits.

* * * * *

February 17, 1851. I have been reading, for six or seven hours without stopping the _Pensées_ of Joubert Ifelt at first a very strong attraction toward the book, and a deep interest in it, but I have already a good dealcooled down These scattered and fragmentary thoughts, falling upon one without a pause, like drops of light,tire, not my head, but reasoning power The merits of Joubert consist in the grace of the style, the vivacity or

finesse of the criticisms, the charm of the metaphors; but he starts many more problems than he solves, he

notices and records more than he explains His philosophy is merely literary and popular; his originality isonly in detail and in execution Altogether, he is a writer of reflections rather than a philosopher, a critic ofremarkable gifts, endowed with exquisite sensibility, but, as an intelligence, destitute of the capacity forco-ordination He wants concentration and continuity It is not that he has no claims to be considered a

philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, on a small

scale He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, a coiner of sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of

aphorisms, counsels, problems; and his book, extracted from the accumulations of his journal during fiftyyears of his life, is a collection of precious stones, of butterflies, coins and engraved gems The whole,

however, is more subtle than strong, more poetical than profound, and leaves upon the reader rather theimpression of a great wealth of small curiosities of value, than of a great intellectual existence and a new point

of view The place of Joubert seems to me then, below and very far from the philosophers and the true poets,but honorable among the moralists and the critics He is one of those men who are superior to their works, andwho have themselves the unity which these lack This first judgment is, besides, indiscriminate and severe Ishall have to modify it later

February 20th. I have almost finished these two volumes of _Pensées_ and the greater part of the

Correspondance This last has especially charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and

precision The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most insignificant All that has to do with largeviews with the whole of things, is very little at Joubert's command; he has no philosophy of history, no

speculative intuition He is the thinker of detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of taste In thissphere of the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within the circle of personal affectation andpreoccupations, of social and educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, inexquisite touches It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, anAeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves Taken as a whole, there is something

impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly

He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality He is rather a soul, a

breath, than a man It is the mind of a woman in the character of a child, so that we feel for him less

admiration than tenderness and gratitude

February 27, 1851. Read over the first book of Emile I was revolted, contrary to all expectation, for I opened

the book with a sort of hunger for style and beauty I was conscious instead of an impression of heaviness and

harshness, of labored, hammering emphasis, of something violent, passionate, and obstinate, without serenity,

greatness, nobility Both the qualities and the defects of the book produced in me a sense of lack of goodmanners, a blaze of talent, but no grace, no distinction, the accent of good company wanting I understoodhow it is that Rousseau rouses a particular kind of repugnance, the repugnance of good taste, and I felt thedanger to style involved in such a model as well as the danger to thought arising from a truth so alloyed andsophisticated What there is of true and strong in Rousseau did not escape me, and I still admired him, but hisbad sides appeared to me with a clearness relatively new

(_Same day._) The _pensée_-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist He plays with

thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in detail, but he is more anxious about truths than

truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him He handles his instrument

agreeably, but he does not possess it, still less does he create it He is a gardener and not a geologist; hecultivates the earth only so much as is necessary to make it produce for him flowers and fruits; he does not digdeep enough into it to understand it In a word, the _pensée_-writer deals with what is superficial and

fragmentary He is the literary, the oratorical, the talking or writing philosopher; whereas the philosopher isthe scientific _pensée_-writer The _pensée_-writers serve to stimulate or to popularize the philosophers Theyhave thus a double use, besides their charm They are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors of thecrowd, the money-changers of thought, which they convert into current coin The writer of _pensée_ is a man

of letters, though of a serious type, and therefore he is popular The philosopher is a specialist, as far as theform of his science goes, though not in substance, and therefore he can never become popular In France, forone philosopher (Descartes) there have been thirty writers of _pensées_; in Germany, for ten such writersthere have been twenty philosophers

March 25, 1851. How many illustrious men whom I have known have been already reaped by death,

Steffens, Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn, Thorwaldsen, Oelenschläger, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr,Lachmann; and with us, Sismondi, Töpffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, poets, musicians, historians

[Footnote: Of these Marheineke, Neander, and Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin during Amiel's

residence there The Danish dramatic poet Oelenschläger and the Swedish writer Tegner were among theScandinavian men of letters with whom he made acquaintance during his tour of Sweden and Denmark in

1845 He probably came across the Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion Schelling and Alexandervon Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were also still holding sway at Berlin when he was a student.There is an interesting description in one of his articles on Berlin, published in the _Bibliothèque Universelle

de Genève_, of a university ceremonial there in or about 1847, and of the effect produced on the student'syoung imagination by the sight of half the leaders of European research gathered into a single room He sawSchlosser, the veteran historian, at Heidelberg at the end of 1843.] The old generation is going What will thenew bring us? What shall we ourselves contribute? A few great old men Schelling, Alexander von Humboldt,Schlosser still link us with the glorious past Who is preparing to bear the weight of the future? A shiverseizes us when the ranks grow thin around us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach the zenith, andwhen destiny says to us: "Show what is in thee! Now is the moment, now is the hour, else fall back intonothingness! It is thy turn! Give the world thy measure, say thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy capacity Comeforth from the shade! It is no longer a question of promising, thou must perform The time of apprenticeship isover Servant, show us what thou hast done with thy talent Speak now, or be silent forever." This appeal ofthe conscience is a solemn summons in the life of every man, solemn and awful as the trumpet of the lastjudgment It cries, "Art thou ready? Give an account Give an account of thy years, thy leisure, thy strength,thy studies, thy talent, and thy works Now and here is the hour of great hearts, the hour of heroism and ofgenius."

April 6, 1851. Was there ever any one so vulnerable as I? If I were a father how many griefs and vexations, achild might cause me As a husband I should have a thousand ways of suffering because my happiness

demands a thousand conditions I have a heart too easily reached, a too restless imagination; despair is easy to

me, and every sensation reverberates again and again within me What might be, spoils for me what is Whatought to be consumes me with sadness So the reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel andeven terrify me I have too much imagination, conscience and penetration, and not enough character The life

of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable;practical life makes me afraid

And yet, at the same time it attracts me; I have need of it Family life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in allits moral depth, appeals to me almost like a duty Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it A

companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship, toward theworld outside, kindness and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral relations whichdevelop round the first, all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes But I put them aside because every hope is,

as it were, an egg whence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab; because

every seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the future may develop.

I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself The ideal poisons for me all imperfectpossession Everything which compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me tothings or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all which injures my idea of the perfect man,hurts me mortally, degrades and wounds me in mind, even beforehand I abhor useless regrets and

repentances The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act, the leading idea of

dramatic art and the most tragic element of life, arrests me more certainly than the arm of the Commandeur I

only act with regret, and almost by force

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon what is irreparable, arbitrary and unforeseen, and aboveall to be so dependent by my fault and through my own error, to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep andhappiness, this would be hell!

All that is necessary, providential, in short, unimputable, I could bear, I think, with some strength of mind.

But responsibility mortally envenoms grief; and as an act is essentially voluntary, therefore I act as little aspossible

Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceitful self-will, craving for repose for satisfaction, for independence! isthere not some relic of selfishness in such a disinterestedness, such a fear, such idle susceptibility

I wish to fulfill my duty, but where is it, what is it? Here inclination comes in again and interprets the oracle.And the ultimate question is this: Does duty consist in obeying one's nature, even the best and most spiritual?

or in conquering it?

Life, is it essentially the education of the mind and intelligence, or that of the will? And does will show itself

in strength or in resignation? If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation, then welcome sickness, hindrances,sufferings of every kind! But if its aim is to produce the perfect man, then one must watch over one's integrity

of mind and body To court trial is to tempt God At bottom, the God of justice veils from me the God of love

I tremble instead of trusting

Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not yet the voice of God.Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a voice which doesaway with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light and serenity Happy, says the apostle, are they who are atpeace with themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the part they take This inner identity, thisunity of conviction, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes, discriminates, and foresees It isdifficult, indeed, for liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct

Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled, and reconquer the points of view

already won, we must fight the fight! The human heart, like kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of

perpetual peace The eternal life is eternally to be re-won Alas, yes! peace itself is a struggle, or rather it isstruggle and activity which are the law We only find rest in effort, as the flame only finds existence in

combustion O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, helland heaven, are equally restless The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn with the same fire Ah,yes, there you have life life double-faced and double-edged The fire which enlightens is also the fire whichconsumes; the element of the gods may become that of the accursed

April 7, 1851. Read a part of Ruge's [Footnote: Arnold Ruge, born in 1803, died at Brighton in 1880,

principal editor of the Hallische, afterward the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ (1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno

Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote He was a member of the parliament of Frankfort.] volume "_Die

Academie_" (1848) where the humanism of the neo-Hegelians in politics, religion, and literature is

represented by correspondents or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc) They recall the philosophist party of

the last century, able to dissolve anything by reason and reasoning, but unable to construct anything; forconstruction rests upon feeling, instinct, and will One finds them mistaking philosophic consciousness forrealizing power, the redemption of the intelligence for the redemption of the heart, that is to say, the part forthe whole These papers make me understand the radical difference between morals and intellectualism Thewriters of them wish to supplant religion by philosophy Man is the principle of their religion, and intellect isthe climax of man Their religion, then, is the religion of intellect There you have the two worlds: Christianitybrings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, humanism by the emancipation of the mind Oneattacks the heart, the other the brain Both wish to enable man to reach his ideal But the ideal differs, if not byits content, at least by the disposition of its content, by the predominance and sovereignty given to this for thatinner power For one, the mind is the organ of the soul; for the other, the soul is an inferior state of the mind;the one wishes to enlighten by making better, the other to make better by enlightening It is the differencebetween Socrates and Jesus.

_The cardinal question is that of sin._ The question of immanence or of dualism is secondary The trinity, thelife to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas, and spiritual realities, the form and the letter mayvanish away, the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves? How can man be led to be truly man?

Is the ultimate root of his being responsibility, yes or no? And is doing or knowing the right, acting or

thinking, his ultimate end? If science does not produce love it is insufficient Now all that science gives is the

amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and grandiose, but

inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissible and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all Moral loveplaces the center of the individual in the center of being It has at least salvation in principle, the germ ofeternal life _To love is virtually to know; to know is not virtually to love_; there you have the relation ofthese two modes of man The redemption wrought by science or by intellectual love is then inferior to theredemption wrought by will or by moral love The first may free a man from himself, it may enfranchise him

from egotism The second drives the ego out of itself, makes it active and fruitful The one is critical,

purifying, negative; the other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive Science, however spiritual and substantial itmay be in itself, is still formal relatively to love Moral force is then the vital point And this force is onlyproduced by moral force Like alone acts upon like Therefore do not amend by reasoning, but by example;approach feeling by feeling; do not hope to excite love except by love Be what you wish others to become.Let yourself and not your words preach for you

Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never replace religion; revolutionaries are not apostles, althoughthe apostles may have been revolutionaries To save from the outside to the inside and by the outside Iunderstand also the intelligence relatively to the will is an error and danger The negative part of the

humanist's work is good; it will strip Christianity of an outer shell, which has become superfluous; but Rugeand Feuerbach cannot save humanity She must have her saints and her heroes to complete the work of her

philosophers Science is the power of man, and love his strength; man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart Knowledge, love, power there is the complete life.

June 16, 1851. This evening I walked up and down on the Pont des Bergues, under a clear, moonless heavendelighting in the freshness of the water, streaked with light from the two quays, and glimmering under thetwinkling stars Meeting all these different groups of young people, families, couples and children, who werereturning to their homes, to their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing or talking as they went, I felt amovement of sympathy for all these passers-by; my eyes and ears became those of a poet or a painter; whileeven one's mere kindly curiosity seems to bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others live

August 15, 1851. To know how to be ready, a great thing, a precious gift, and one that implies calculation,grasp and decision To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; hemust know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot

be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business, and his life To knowhow to be ready, is to know how to start

It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up with the thousand and one hindrances and dutieswhich are not such, but which nevertheless wind us about with their spider threads and fetter the movement ofour wings It is the lack of order which makes us slaves; the confusion of to-day discounts the freedom ofto-morrow.

Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is born of procrastination To know how to be ready wemust be able to finish Nothing is done but what is finished The things which we leave dragging behind uswill start up again later on before us and harass our path Let each day take thought for what concerns it,liquidate its own affairs and respect the day which is to follow, and then we shall be always ready To knowhow to be ready is at bottom to know how to die

September 2, 1851. Read the work of Tocqueville ("_De la Democratie en Amérique_.") My impression is asyet a mixed one A fine book, but I feel in it a little too much imitation of Montesquieu This abstract, piquant,sententious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined and monotonous It has too much cleverness and not enoughimagination It makes one think, more than it charms, and though really serious, it seems flippant His method

of splitting up a thought, of illuminating a subject by successive facets, has serious inconveniences We seethe details too clearly, to the detriment of the whole A multitude of sparks gives but a poor light

Nevertheless, the author is evidently a ripe and penetrating intelligence, who takes a comprehensive view ofhis subject, while at the same time possessing a power of acute and exhaustive analysis

September 6th. Tocqueville's book has on the whole a calming effect upon the mind, but it leaves a certainsense of disgust behind It makes one realize the necessity of what is happening around us and the

inevitableness of the goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain that the era of mediocrity in everything is

beginning, and mediocrity freezes all desire Equality engenders uniformity, and it is by sacrificing what isexcellent, remarkable, and extraordinary that we get rid of what is bad The whole becomes less barbarous,and at the same time more vulgar

The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning The century ofindividualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals By continualleveling and division of labor, society will become everything and man nothing

As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down of the mountains, what is average willrise at the expense of what is great The exceptional will disappear A plateau with fewer and fewer

undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be the aspect of human society The

statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress ofthings; on the other, a decline of souls The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, politicaleconomy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry The spleen will become the malady of a leveling age

Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? May not the general well-being be purchased too dearly

at such a price? The creative force which in the beginning we see forever tending to produce and multiplydifferences, will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate them one by one? And equality, which in the dawn

of existence is mere inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the natural form of life? Or rather, abovethe economic and political equality to which the socialist and non-socialist democracy aspires, taking it toooften for the term of its efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a church of refuge, a republic ofsouls, in which, far beyond the region of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism,enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an abiding city? Utilitarian materialism,barren well-being, the idolatry of the flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, are they to be thegoal if our efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors of our race? I do not believe it The ideal ofhumanity is something different and higher

But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must first banish from among us all suffering which issuperfluous and has its origin in social arrangements, before we can return to spiritual goods

September 7, 1851 (_Aix_). It is ten o'clock at night A strange and mystic moonlight, with a fresh breezeand a sky crossed by a few wandering clouds, makes our terrace delightful These pale and gentle rays shedfrom the zenith a subdued and penetrating peace; it is like the calm joy or the pensive smile of experience,combined with a certain stoic strength The stars shine, the leaves tremble in the silver light Not a sound in allthe landscape; great gulfs of shadow under the green alleys and at the corners of the steps Everything issecret, solemn, mysterious.

O night hours, hours of silence and solitude! with you are grace and melancholy; you sadden and you console.You speak to us of all that has passed away, and of all that must still die, but you say to us, "courage!" andyou promise us rest

November 9, 1851 (Sunday). At the church of St Gervais, a second sermon from Adolphe Monod, lessgrandiose perhaps but almost more original, and to me more edifying than that of last Sunday The subjectwas St Paul or the active life, his former one having been St John or the inner life, of the Christian I felt thegolden spell of eloquence: I found myself hanging on the lips of the orator, fascinated by his boldness, hisgrace, his energy, and his art, his sincerity, and his talent; and it was borne in upon me that for some mendifficulties are a source of inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is for them the occasion of

their highest triumphs He made St Paul cry during an hour and a half; he made an old nurse of him, he

hunted up his old cloak, his prescriptions of water and wine to Timothy, the canvas that he mended, his friendTychicus, in short, all that could raise a smile; and from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most austereand penetrating lessons He made the whole St Paul, martyr, apostle and man, his grief, his charities, histenderness, live again before us, and this with a grandeur, an unction, a warmth of reality, such as I had neverseen equaled

How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain in our century of comfort, when shepherds and sheep alike sinkbenumbed in Capuan languors, such an apotheosis of ardent charity in a time of coldness and indifference

toward souls, such an apotheosis of a human, natural, inbred Christianity, in an age, when some put it, so to

speak, above man, and others below man! Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt upon the necessity for a newpeople, for a stronger generation, if the world is to be saved from the tempests which threaten it "People ofGod, awake! Sow in tears, that ye may reap in triumph!" What a study is such a sermon! I felt all the

extraordinary literary skill of it, while my eyes were still dim with tears Diction, composition, similes, all isinstructive and precious to remember I was astonished, shaken, taken hold of

November 18, 1851. The energetic subjectivity, which has faith in itself, which does not fear to be somethingparticular and definite without any consciousness or shame of its subjective illusion, is unknown to me I am,

so far as the intellectual order is concerned, essentially objective, and my distinctive speciality, is to be able toplace myself in all points of view, to see through all eyes, to emancipate myself, that is to say, from theindividual prison Hence aptitude for theory and irresolution in practice; hence critical talent and difficulty inspontaneous production Hence, also, a continuous uncertainty of conviction and opinion, so long as myaptitude remained mere instinct; but now that it is conscious and possesses itself, it is able to conclude andaffirm in its turn, so that, after having brought disquiet, it now brings peace It says: "There is no repose forthe mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine." Nothingfinite is true, is interesting, or worthy to fix my attention All that is particular is exclusive, and all that isexclusive, repels me There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being throughthe whole of Being Then, in the light of the absolute, every idea becomes worth studying; in that of theinfinite, every existence worth respecting; in that of the divine, every creature worth loving

December 2, 1851. Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with theplowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds maybring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests,

an altar for the unknown God Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it If youare conscious of something new thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being do not be in a

hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge itround with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of yourhappiness to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception should be enwrapped by the triple veil ofmodesty, silence and night.

to refresh one's will day by day

* * * * *

It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the conscience which educates history Fact iscorrupting, it is we who correct it by the persistence of our ideal The soul moralizes the past in order not to bedemoralized by it Like the alchemists of the middle ages, she finds in the crucible of experience only the goldthat she herself has poured into it

* * * * *

February 1, 1852 (Sunday). Passed the afternoon in reading the Monologues of Schleiermacher This little

book made an impression on me almost as deep as it did twelve years ago, when I read it for the first time Itreplunged me into the inner world, to which I return with joy whenever I may have forsaken it I was ablebesides, to measure my progress since then by the transparency of all the thoughts to me, and by the freedomwith which I entered into and judged the point of view

It is great, powerful, profound, but there is still pride in it, and even selfishness For the center of the universe

is still the self, the great Ich of Fichte The tameless liberty, the divine dignity of the individual spirit,

expanding till it admits neither any limit nor anything foreign to itself, and conscious of a strength instinct

with creative force, such is the point of view of the Monologues.

The inner life in its enfranchisement from time, in its double end, the realization of the species and of theindividuality, in its proud dominion over all hostile circumstances, in its prophetic certainty of the future, inits immortal youth, such is their theme Through them we are enabled to enter into a life of monumentalinterest, wholly original and beyond the influence of anything exterior, an astonishing example of the

autonomy of the ego, an imposing type of character, Zeno and Fichte in one But still the motive power of this

life is not religious; it is rather moral and philosophic I see in it not so much a magnificent model to imitate as

a precious subject of study This ideal of a liberty, absolute, indefeasible, inviolable, respecting itself aboveall, disdaining the visible and the universe, and developing itself after its own laws alone, is also the ideal ofEmerson, the stoic of a young America According to it, man finds his joy in himself, and, safe in the

inaccessible sanctuary, of his personal consciousness, becomes almost a god [Footnote: Compare Clough'slines:

"Where are the great, whom thou would'st wish to praise thee? Where are the pure, whom thou would'stchoose to love thee? Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee? Whose high commands would cheer,

whose chidings raise thee? Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find In the stones, bread, and life in the blankmind."]

He is himself principle, motive, and end of his own destiny; he is himself, and that is enough for him Thissuperb triumph of life is not far from being a sort of impiety, or at least a displacement of adoration By themere fact that it does away with humility, such a superhuman point of view becomes dangerous; it is the verytemptation to which the first man succumbed, that of becoming his own master by becoming like unto the

Elohim Here then the heroism of the philosopher approaches temerity, and the Monologues are therefore

open to three reproaches: Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual universe is wrongly indicated; theindividual soul, not being unique and not springing from itself, can it be conceived without God?

Psychologically, the force of spontaneity in the ego is allowed a dominion too exclusive of any other As a

fact, it is not everything in man Morally, evil is scarcely named, and conflict, the condition of true peace, is

left out of count So that the peace described in the Monologues is neither a conquest by man nor a grace from

heaven; it is rather a stroke of good fortune

February 2d. Still the Monologues Critically I defended myself enough against them yesterday; I may

abandon myself now, without scruple and without danger, to the admiration and the sympathy with whichthey inspire me This life so proudly independent, this sovereign conception of human dignity, this actualpossession of the universe and the infinite, this perfect emancipation from all which passes, this calm sense ofstrength and superiority, this invincible energy of will, this infallible clearness of self-vision, this autocracy ofthe consciousness which is its own master, all these decisive marks of a royal personality of a nature

Olympian, profound, complete, harmonious, penetrate the mind with joy and heart with gratitude What a life!what a man! These glimpses into the inner regions of a great soul do one good Contact of this kind

strengthens, restores, refreshes Courage returns as we gaze; when we see what has been, we doubt no more

that it can be again At the sight of a man we too say to ourselves, let us also be men.

March 3, 1852. Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is painful when we are amongfriends, and harmful in the case of the outer world We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it isbetter, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent The first error is a meanness; the second an

imprudence We should be ashamed of the one; we may regret the other Look to yourself; you are muchgiven to this last fault, and it has already done you great harm Be ready to bend your pride; abase yourselfeven so far as to show yourself ready and clever like others This world of skillful egotisms and active

ambitions, this world of men, in which one must deceive by smiles, conduct, and silence as much as by actualwords, a world revolting to the proud and upright soul, it is our business to learn to live in it! Success isrequired in it: succeed Only force is recognized there: be strong Opinion seeks to impose her law upon all,instead of setting her at defiance, it would be better to struggle with her and conquer I understand theindignation of contempt, and the wish to crush, roused irresistibly by all that creeps, all that is tortuous,oblique, ignoble But I cannot maintain such a mood, which is a mood of vengeance, for long This world is

a world of men, and these men are our brothers We must not banish from us the divine breath, we must love.Evil must be conquered by good; and before all things one must keep a pure conscience Prudence may bepreached from this point of view too "Be ye simple as the dove and prudent as the serpent," are the words ofJesus Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's work, and out

of love for truth There is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justifyitself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion It requires ability, to make what we seem agree with what weare, and humility, to feel that we are no great things

There, thanks to this journal, my excitement has passed away I have just read the last book of it throughagain, and the morning has passed by On the way I have been conscious of a certain amount of monotony Itdoes not signify! These pages are not written to be read; they are written for my own consolation and warning.They are landmarks in my past; and some of the landmarks are funeral crosses, stone pyramids, witheredstalks grown green again, white pebbles, coins all of them helpful toward finding one's way again throughthe Elysian fields of the soul The pilgrim has marked his stages in it; he is able to trace by it his thoughts, his

tears, his joys This is my traveling diary: if some passages from it may be useful to others, and if sometimeseven I have communicated such passages to the public, these thousand pages as a whole are only of value to

me and to those who, after me, may take some interest in the itinerary of an obscurely conditioned soul, farfrom the world's noise and fame These sheets will be monotonous when my life is so; they will repeat

themselves when feelings repeat themselves; truth at any rate will be always there, and truth is their onlymuse, their only pretext, their only duty

April 2, 1852. What a lovely walk! Sky clear, sun rising, all the tints bright, all the outlines sharp, save forthe soft and misty infinite of the lake A pinch of white frost, powdered the fields, lending a metallic relief tothe hedges of green box, and to the whole landscape, still without leaves, an air of health and vigor, of youthand freshness "Bathe, O disciple, thy thirsty soul in the dew of the dawn!" says Faust, to us, and he is right.The morning air breathes a new and laughing energy into veins and marrow If every day is a repetition of life,every dawn gives signs as it were a new contract with existence At dawn everything is fresh, light, simple, as

it is for children At dawn spiritual truth, like the atmosphere, is more transparent, and our organs, like theyoung leaves, drink in the light more eagerly, breathe in more ether, and less of things earthly If night and thestarry sky speak to the meditative soul of God, of eternity and the infinite, the dawn is the time for projects,for resolutions, for the birth of action While the silence and the "sad serenity of the azure vault," incline thesoul to self-recollection, the vigor and gayety of nature spread into the heart and make it eager for life andliving Spring is upon us Primroses and violets have already hailed her coming Rash blooms are showing onthe peach trees; the swollen buds of the pear trees and the lilacs point to the blossoming that is to be; thehoneysuckles are already green

April 26, 1852. This evening a feeling of emptiness took possession of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, thefuture, solitude, pressed themselves upon me I gave myself to meditation, a very necessary defense againstthe dispersion and distraction brought about by the day's work and its detail Read a part of Krause's book

"_Urbild der Menschheit_" [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's younger contemporary,and the author of a system which he called _panentheism_ Amiel alludes to it later on.] which answeredmarvelously to my thought and my need This philosopher has always a beneficent effect upon me; his sweetreligious serenity gains upon me and invades me He inspires me with a sense of peace and infinity

Still I miss something, common worship, a positive religion, shared with other people Ah! when will thechurch to which I belong in heart rise into being? I cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the rightall alone I must have a less solitary Christianity My religious needs are not satisfied any more than my socialneeds, or my needs of affection Generally I am able to forget them and lull them to sleep But at times they

wake up with a sort of painful bitterness I waver between languor and ennui, between frittering myself

away on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant It is like the situation whichFrench novelists are so fond of, the story of a _vie de province_; only the province is all that is not the country

of the soul, every place where the heart feels itself strange, dissatisfied, restless and thirsty Alas! well

understood, this place is the earth, this country of one's dreams is heaven, and this suffering is the eternalhomesickness, the thirst for happiness

"_In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister_," says Goethe _Mâle résignation_, this also is the motto ofthose who are masters of the art of life; "manly," that is to say, courageous, active, resolute, persevering,

"resignation," that is to say, self-sacrifice, renunciation, limitation Energy in resignation, there lies the

wisdom of the sons of earth, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle and of combat In it is the peace

of martyrdom, in it too the promise of triumph

April 28, 1852 (Lancy.) [Footnote: A village near Geneva.] Once more I feel the spring languor creepingover me, the spring air about me This morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, the tranquilsunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green fields, all rose into and filled my heart Now all is silent Osilence, thou art terrible! terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the fathomless abyssesbelow Thou showest us in ourselves depths which make us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of

suffering Welcome tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters with their terriblesecrets Welcome the passion blasts which stir the wares of the soul, and so veil from us its bottomless gulfs!

In all of us, children of dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary anguish, and the infinite, a

mysterious terror We seem to be entering a kingdom of the dead Poor heart, thy craving is for life, for love,for illusions! And thou art right after all, for life is sacred

In these moments of _tête-à-tête_ with the infinite, how different life looks! How all that usually occupies andexcites us becomes suddenly puerile, frivolous and vain We seem to ourselves mere puppets, marionettes,strutting seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking gewgaws for things of great price At such

moments, how everything becomes transformed, how everything changes! Berkeley and Fichte seem right,Emerson too; the world is but an allegory; the idea is more real than the fact; fairy tales, legends, are as true asnatural history, and even more true, for they are emblems of greater transparency The only substance

properly so called is the soul What is all the rest? Mere shadow, pretext, figure, symbol, or dream

Consciousness alone is immortal, positive, perfectly real The world is but a firework, a sublime

phantasmagoria, destined to cheer and form the soul Consciousness is a universe, and its sun is love Already I am falling back into the objective life of thought It delivers me from shall I say? no, it deprives me

of the intimate life of feeling Reflection solves reverie and burns her delicate wings This is why science doesnot make men, but merely entities and abstractions Ah, let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis!Let us put spontaneity, _nạveté_, before reflection, experience before study; let us make life itself our study.Shall I then never have the heart of a woman to rest upon? a son in whom to live again, a little world where Imay see flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink and draw back, for fear of breaking mydream I have staked so much on this card that I dare not play it Let me dream again

Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscillations of feeling They are your life and your nature;One wiser than you ordained them Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will Instinct is asiren, will a despot Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract andgeneral plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give toyour life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan Let what is natural in you raise itself tothe level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural Thus will your development beharmonious, and the peace of heaven will shine upon your brow; always on condition that your peace is made,and that you have climbed your Calvary

_Afternoon_ Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past days, as, for instance, once, when Iwas still quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting among the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in themountains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a tree and visited by three butterflies; and againanother night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes wanderingover the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in whichone seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine moments, hours

of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respirationlarge, tranquil, and profound, like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless like the blue heaven!Visits from the muse, Urania, who traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus

of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the authority ofgenius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm like agod! From the celestial spheres down to the shell or the moss, the whole of creation is then submitted to ourgaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes in us its eternal work with the regularity of destiny and the

passionate ardor of love What hours, what memories! The traces which remain to us of them are enough tofill us with respect and enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of the Holy Spirit And then, to fall backagain from these heights with their boundless horizons into the muddy ruts of triviality! what a fall! PoorMoses! Thou too sawest undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the promised land, and it was thy fatenevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not his promised land, hisday of ecstasy and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see in glimpses, and

how these flaming lightnings of our prophetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous manhood moredark and dreary!

April 29 (Lancy). This morning the air was calm, the sky slightly veiled I went out into the garden to seewhat progress the spring was making I strolled from the irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds, and in theshrubberies Delightful surprise! at the corner of the walk, half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small

leaved chorchorus had flowered during the night Gay and fresh as a bunch of bridal flowers, the little shrub

glittered before me in all the attraction of its opening beauty What springlike innocence, what soft and

modest loveliness, there was in these white corollas, opening gently to the sun, like thoughts which smileupon us at waking, and perched upon their young leaves of virginal green like bees upon the wing! Mother ofmarvels, mysterious and tender nature, why do we not live more in thee? The poetical _flâneurs_ of Tưpffer,his Charles and Jules, the friends and passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished

beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at once a reproach and a lesson A modest garden and acountry rectory, the narrow horizon of a garret, contain for those who know how to look and to wait more

instruction than a library, even than that of Mon oncle [Footnote: The allusions in this passage are to

Tưpffer's best known books "La Presbytère" and "La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle," that airy chronicle of ahundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young student Jules for its center.] Yes, we are toobusy, too encumbered, too much occupied, too active! We read too much! The one thing needful is to throwoff all one's load of cares, of preoccupations, of pedantry, and to become again young, simple, child-like,living happily and gratefully in the present hour We must know how to put occupation aside, which does notmean that we must be idle In an inaction which is meditative and attentive the wrinkles of the soul are

smoothed away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and springs afresh, and, like the trodden grass of theroadside or the bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, spontaneous, true, and original.Reverie, like the rain of night, restores color and force to thoughts which have been blanched and wearied bythe heat of the day With gentle fertilizing power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping germs, and asthough in play, gathers round us materials for the future, and images for the use of talent _Reverie is theSunday of thought_; and who knows which is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious tension

of the week, or the life-giving repose of the Sabbath? The _flânerie_ so exquisitely glorified and sung byTưpffer is not only delicious, but useful It is like a bath which gives vigor and suppleness to the whole being,

to the mind as to the body; it is the sign and festival of liberty, a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet

of the butterfly wandering from flower to flower over the hills and in the fields And remember, the soul too is

a butterfly

May 2, 1852 (Sunday) Lancy. This morning read the epistle of St James, the exegetical volume of Cellérier[Footnote: Jacob-Élysée Cellérier, professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and son of the pastor ofSatigny mentioned in Madame de Stặl's "L'Allemagne."] on this epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, afterhaving first of all passed more than an hour in the garden with the children I made them closely examine theflowers, the shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in order to practice them in observation, in wonder, in

kindness

How enormously important are these first conversations of childhood! I felt it this morning with a sort ofreligious terror Innocence and childhood are sacred The sower who casts in the seed, the father or mothercasting in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act and ought to perform it with religious awe, withprayer and gravity, for they are laboring at the kingdom of God All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing,

whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls Man is a husbandman; his whole work rightly understood is

to develop life, to sow it everywhere Such is the mission of humanity, and of this divine mission the greatinstrument is speech We forget too often that language is both a seed-sowing and a revelation The influence

of a word in season, is it not incalculable? What a mystery is speech! But we are blind to it, because we arecarnal and earthy We see the stones and the trees by the road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpableand material We have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which people the air and hover incessantlyaround each one of us

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda As far as lies in itspower, it tends to transform the universe and humanity into its own image Thus we have all a cure of souls.Every man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices aship upon the rocks if it does not guide it into port Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is anunspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others; but there are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of all thefalse gods Such is the high importance of example Thence comes the terrible responsibility which weighsupon us all An evil example is a spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of a sacrilegious faith, of an impureGod Sin would be only an evil for him who commits it, were it not a crime toward the weak brethren, whom

it corrupts Therefore, it has been said: "It were better for a man not to have been born than to offend one ofthese little ones."

May 6, 1852. It is women who, like mountain flowers, mark with most characteristic precision the gradation

of social zones The hierarchy of classes is plainly visible among them; it is blurred in the other sex Withwomen this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; among men we see it broken by the incalculablevarieties of human freedom The reason is that the man on the whole, makes himself by his own activity, andthat the woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that the one modifies and shapes circumstance by hisown energy, while the gentleness of the other is dominated by and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so tospeak, inclines to be species, and man to be individual

Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which is most constant and most variable Most constantfrom the moral point of view, most variable from the social A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy in thesecond All degrees of culture and all conditions of society are clearly marked in their outward appearance,their manners and their tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their instincts, and theirdesires The feminine sex represents at the same time natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity

of the species and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and divides, it gathers and separates, itmakes castes and breaks through them, according as it interprets its twofold _rôle_ in the one sense or theother At bottom, woman's mission is essentially conservative, but she is a conservative without

discrimination On the one side, she maintains God's work in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly human,

in the race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness On the other, she maintains the results of circumstance, all that

is passing, local, and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses Shesurrounds with the same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and the frivolous, the good and the bad.Well, what then? Isolate if you can, the fire from its smoke It is a divine law that you are tracing, and

therefore good The woman preserves; she is tradition as the man is progress And if there is no family and nohumanity without the two sexes, without these two forces there is no history

May 14, 1852 (Lancy.) Yesterday I was full of the philosophy of joy, of youth, of the spring, which smilesand the roses which intoxicate; I preached the doctrine of strength, and I forgot that, tried and afflicted like thetwo friends with whom I was walking, I should probably have reasoned and felt as they did

Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our character, or the theory of our situation, that is to say,

we like to think of what has been given as having been acquired, we take our nature for our own work, andour lot in life for our own conquest, an illusion born of vanity and also of the craving for liberty We areunwilling to be the product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an inner germ And yet we havereceived everything, and the part which is really ours, is small indeed, for it is mostly made up of negation,

resistance, faults We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in which we receive, this is

what is still ours Let us then, receive trustfully without shame or anxiety Let us humbly accept from Godeven our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently Not that we are called upon to accept the evil

and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease And let us never be afraid

of innocent joy; God is good, and what He does is well done; resign yourself to everything, even to happiness;ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of detachment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy and gratitude,that genuine and religious optimism which sees in God a father, and asks no pardon for His benefits We mustdare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves always as the depositaries, not as the authors of

our own joy.

* * * * *

This evening I saw the first glow-worm of the season in the turf beside the little winding road which

descends from Lancy toward the town It was crawling furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or adawning talent

June 17, 1852. Every despotism has a specially keen and hostile instinct for whatever keeps up humandignity, and independence And it is curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as a means

of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions under a dead weight of facts

Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses To crush what isspiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, by specializing him; to form mere wheels of the great socialmachine, instead of perfect individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to enslave thesoul to things, to de-personalize man, this is the dominant drift of our epoch Everywhere you may see atendency to substitute the laws of dead matter (number, mass) for the laws of the moral nature (persuasion,adhesion, faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma; unity aimed at through uniformity;

numbers doing duty for argument; negative liberty, which has no law in itself, and recognizes no limit except

in force, everywhere taking the place of positive liberty, which means action guided by an inner law and

curbed by a moral authority Socialism versus individualism: this is how Vinet put the dilemma I should say

rather that it is only the eternal antagonism between letter and spirit, between form and matter, between theoutward and the inward, appearance and reality, which is always present in every conception and in all ideas

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes everything vulgar and every truth false And there is areligious and political materialism which spoils all that it touches, liberty, equality, individuality So that thereare two ways of understanding democracy

What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the soul, the very nobility of man Todefend the soul, its interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the danger Whatthe writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has to do, is to defend humanity in man Man! the trueman, the ideal man! Such should be their motto, their rallying cry War to all that debases, diminishes,

hinders, and degrades him; protection for all that fortifies, ennobles, and raises him The test of every

religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms If a system injures the intelligence it isbad If it injures the character it is vicious If it injures the conscience it is criminal

August 12, 1852 (Lancy.) Each sphere of being tends toward a higher sphere, and has already revelationsand presentiments of it The ideal under all its forms is the anticipation and the prophetic vision of that

existence, higher than his own, toward which every being perpetually aspires And this higher and moredignified existence is more inward in character, that is to say, more spiritual Just as volcanoes reveal to us thesecrets of the interior of the globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy are the passing explosions of this inner world ofthe soul; and human life is but the preparation and the means of approach to this spiritual life The degrees ofinitiation are innumerable Watch, then, disciple of life, watch and labor toward the development of the angelwithin thee! For the divine Odyssey is but a series of more and more ethereal metamorphoses, in which eachform, the result of what goes before, is the condition of those which follow The divine life is a series ofsuccessive deaths, in which the mind throws off its imperfections and its symbols, and yields to the growingattraction of the ineffable center of gravitation, the sun of intelligence and love Created spirits in the

accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to speak, to form constellations and milky ways within the

empyrean of the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the sovereign with a sparkling court

In their greatness lies their homage The divinity with which they are invested is the noblest glory of God.God is the father of spirits, and the constitution of the eternal kingdom rests on the vassalship of love

September 27, 1852 (Lancy.) To-day I complete my thirty-first year

The most beautiful poem there is, is life life which discerns its own story in the making, in which inspirationand self-consciousness go together and help each other, life which knows itself to be the world in little, arepetition in miniature of the divine universal poem Yes, be man; that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be theimage of God, be what is greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all the spheres of being, be infinite will andidea, a reproduction of the great whole And be everything while being nothing, effacing thyself, letting God

enter into thee as the air enters an empty space, reducing the ego to the mere vessel which contains the divine

essence Be humble, devout, silent, that so thou mayest hear within the depths of thyself the subtle and

profound voice; be spiritual and pure, that so thou mayest have communion with the pure spirit Withdrawthyself often into the sanctuary of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and atom, that so thoumayest free thyself from space, time, matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest escape thy very organsthemselves and thine own life That is to say, die often, and examine thyself in the presence of this death, as apreparation for the last death He who can without shuddering confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, disease,betrayal, poverty; he who can without terror appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can call himselfprepared for partial or total death How far am I from anything of the sort, how far is my heart from any suchstoicism! But at least we can try to detach ourselves from all that can be taken away from us, to accept

everything as a loan and a gift, and to cling only to the imperishable this at any rate we can attempt Tobelieve in a good and fatherly God, who educates us, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who punishesonly when he must, and takes away only with regret; this thought, or rather this conviction, gives courage andsecurity Oh, what need we have of love, of tenderness, of affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are,

we the sons of God, we, immortal and sovereign beings! Strong as the universe or feeble as the worm,

according as we represent God or only ourselves, as we lean upon infinite being, or as we stand alone

The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active and moral, spiritual and profound, alone gives to lifeall the dignity and all the energy of which it is capable Religion makes invulnerable and invincible Earth canonly be conquered in the name of heaven All good things are given over and above to him who desires butrighteousness To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the feet of him whom it cannot tempt.Why? Because spirit is lord of matter, and the world belongs to God "Be of good cheer," saith a heavenlyvoice, "I have overcome the world."

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the flesh, but willing in the spirit!

October 31, 1852 (Lancy.) Walked for half an hour in the garden A fine rain was falling, and the landscapewas that of autumn The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distantmountains, a melancholy nature The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under thetears of irremediable grief A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the Shrubberies, andplaying games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys The ground strewn with leaves, brown,yellow, and reddish; the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and decked in ragged splendors of

dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still lingering behind, roses,nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned hedges; and the fir, the onlygreen thing left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these innumerable and marveloussymbols which forms colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all times to the eyewhich has learned to look for them, charmed and enthralled me I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch

a phenomenon to make it render up to me its moral significance Every landscape is, as it were, a state of thesoul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail Truepoetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences

is able at most to attain as a final result The soul of nature is divined by the poet; the man of science, onlyserves to accumulate materials for its demonstration

November 6, 1852. I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within me Like a tamer of wildbeasts, I keep them caged and lassoed, but I sometimes hear them growling I have stifled more than onenascent love Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking intrue life, and less durable than myself I choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come The

loves of sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through and rejected them all; I sought the lovewhich springs from the central profundities of being And I still believe in it I will have none of those

passions of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope for the love which is great,pure and earnest, which lives and works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the soul And even if I

go lonely to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul should contentitself with any meaner union

November 8, 1852. Responsibility is my invisible nightmare To suffer through one's own fault is a tormentworthy of the lost, for so grief is envenomed by ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, that which springs fromshame of one's self I have only force and energy wherewith to meet evils coming from outside; but an

irreparable evil brought about by myself, a renunciation for life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the verythought of it is maddening I expiate my privilege indeed My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to

be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of thetragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, fromthe theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence I feel myself forced

to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poetwho is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of It is astrange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to

my own little _rôle_, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself,because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in thepiece Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere

It is a _Doppelgängerei_, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and therepugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany There is, as it were, a degradation agnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality.Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and thechosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from theempyrean

How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? By striving to restore in one's self something of thatunconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct, which reconciles us to earth and makes man useful and relativelyhappy

By believing more practically in the providence which pardons and allows of reparation

By accepting our human condition in a more simple and childlike spirit, fearing trouble less, calculating less,hoping more For we decrease our responsibility, if we decrease our clearness of vision, and fear lessens withthe lessening of responsibility

By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and lessons

November 9, 1852. A few pages of the _Chrestomathie Française_ and Vinet's remarkable letter at the head

of the volume, have given me one or two delightful hours As a thinker, as a Christian, and as a man, Vinetoccupies a typical place His philosophy, his theology, his esthetics, in short, his work, will be, or has beenalready surpassed at all points His was a great soul and a fine talent But neither were well enough served bycircumstances We see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man of singular goodness and a writer

of distinction, but not quite a great man, nor yet a great writer Profundity and purity, these are what hepossesses in a high degree, but not greatness, properly speaking For that, he is a little too subtle and

analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough flow,

eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness Essentially and constantly meditative, he has not strengthenough left to deal with what is outside him The casuistries of conscience and of language, eternal

self-suspicion, and self-examination, his talent lies in these things, and is limited by them Vinet wants

passion, abundance, _entraînement_, and therefore popularity The individualism which is his title to glory is